[yebyen]

> It's just (at best) an incomplete solution or (at worst) a bad solution that fails at the worst possible moment

Well, those are two possibilities, but a third is that you don't need it because of one of several possible reasons.

The debt metaphor still fails to hold up; the nice thing about accepting "technical debt" into your project is that you may never come upon a time where it needs to be paid off at all. Not all tech debt must be paid off.

Usually only the highest priority tech debt can actually be paid down, and it doesn't always come with an interest cost. But when it starts to "come due," if you're an engineer in the hot seat, you can often (usually) tell pretty quickly just how much the "interest payment" actually affects your ability to deliver future iterations.

Your "customers" or stakeholders can tell too, indirectly, when your estimates start outpacing their "very reasonable expectations."